1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains in general to natural language processing and in particular to summarizing sentiment about aspects of an entity expressed in reviews and other documents.
2. Description of the Related Art
Online user reviews are increasingly becoming the de-facto standard for measuring the quality of entities such as electronics, restaurants, and hotels. The sheer volume of online reviews makes it difficult for a human to process and extract all meaningful information in order to make an educated decision. While in some cases an average “star rating” for the entity may give a coarse-grained perspective on the opinions about the entity, this average rating may be insufficient information on which to make a decision.
For instance, a given user shopping for a digital music player may be particularly concerned with battery life and sound quality, and less focused on the device's weight or the variety of colors in which it is manufactured. However, as different authors tend to structure their reviews in different ways, it is difficult to identify the prevailing opinions on the specific aspects in which the user is interested, without exhaustively reading the reviews. Similarly, a user seeking opinions on hotel rooms might find an online review site that summarizes the hotel's reviews as three out of five stars. However, the user would not know how the hotel rated on individual aspects, such as service and location, without reading the reviews.